Island that Dared (57 page)

Unfortunately the fate of South Africa’s blacks in the intervening years has proved me right. Whites have retained most of the fertile land and they share other lucrative assets with a minority of ruthless blacks. In 2005 more than half the black population continued to live far below the official poverty line, still enduring inadequate housing, schooling and health care. Meanwhile unemployment is being exacerbated by migrants from other ‘democracies’ – like Zimbabwe. In 1959 Fidel chose ‘a new order based on justice for the majority’ – Cuba’s minority being allergic to reconciliation with the Revolution.

At 2.00 p.m., as we approached the coast at Matanzas, the dark clouds sank lower and a gale sent the royal palm fronds streaming eastwards. The storm broke as we dawdled into Havana station, the engine seeming
exhausted after its twenty-hour journey. By then Ernesto and I had had some revealing conversations; he was proud of being an ‘independent dissident’. Now he invited me to stay in his Vedado home – ‘we have room and I like to talk English’.

A bicitaxi took us through an almost deserted Havana; on every street sheets of water rushed towards flooding gutters. To semi-shelter us, the young cyclist had rolled down two plastic sheets, tied to the canopy struts. He told us the storm was forecast to continue for at least thirty-six hours. Then, between thunder claps, he and Ernesto talked baseball.

We stopped outside a three-storeyed balconied villa with a large front garden where the potted palms had already been overturned. Inside, archways divided high, wide rooms and a white marble staircase led to the first floor flat where Mamma advanced to greet her son – then paused, exuding hostility to his foreign guest. She was a small, slight,
chain-smoking
woman with narrow hazel eyes and a permanently pursed mouth. I would have left immediately but for the deluge; I was far from No. 403 and my aged rucksack, containing those precious books, is no longer as waterproof as once it was.

A flustered Ernesto showed me to my room and explained, ‘We’ve no licence and my mother is scared of the police. She hates Fidel and she thinks they know that and watch her. That’s crazy, only family know. She goes to our CDR meetings and seems OK there, she acts well.’

I said, with a hint of reproach, ‘But didn’t you realise she’d be angry about me?’

Ernesto stared at his toes and replied, ‘This is my home, too. I want to live another way, not scared, able to have foreign friends. The government wants millions of tourists and makes publicity about Cubans giving
welcomes
. That’s good, but it’s bad to need a licence to give welcomes.’

As Ernesto’s foreign friend I was dual purpose – a symbol of his defiance of government regulations and a weapon in this mother-son conflict. He apologised then; he hadn’t foreseen it would be so difficult … And it got worse. To my host’s extreme mortification Mamma asserted that there was no food to spare for a guest and Ernesto naturally didn’t believe my claiming never to eat in the evening.

The
baño
was on the far side of a spacious living-room where an ancient, mildly senile
abuela
spent hours sitting in front of a soundless TV set, dim eyes fixed on meaningless images. Her son had long ago died in a car crash; Ernesto could scarcely remember him. I never saw Mamma again. Ernesto joined me for a time in my pleasant room, its french window
leading to a square balcony furnished with a wrought-iron table and chairs. Our conversation was not lively; we both needed an early night.

Thunder, lightning, a gale force wind and torrential rain continued until 9.50 next morning, by which time Ernesto had left for the university in a colleague’s Lada. It only half-surprised me that I was not offered a lift; Mamma would have blocked that courtesy. A black ‘daily’ let me out and between further heavy showers I walked to No.403 via the Malecón where the road was closed to traffic and a coconut hit me on the head. I was lucky, it might have been a stone; waves were hurling an awesome tonnage of litter over the wall and strewing it across the street – everything from planks of wood to bottle-tops. Interestingly, there was no broken glass: a valuable commodity, rarely discarded.

Next morning I watched small earth-movers pushing all this litter into piles which were then loaded on to lorries by men using shovels and brushes. This labour-intensive procedure left the Malecón immaculate. Two days later an even wilder storm, with still higher waves, threw up only a few stones, fish and clumps of seaweed.

I found many of my Havana friends seething because Bush II had just broken a four-year silence on Cuba to address that amorphous entity, ‘the international community’. Said he:

The President of the United States ended with a special message for the armed forces of another sovereign state:

To this incitement to civil war Felipe Perez Roque, as Foreign Minister, responded calmly. He noted that Mr Bush wanted to reconquer Cuba by force but the notion of an internal uprising was ‘a politically impossible fantasy’. Next day
Granma
published Fidel’s latest essay – ‘Bush, Hunger and Death’ – in which Fidel wrote of the grim reality that ‘The danger of a massive world famine is aggravated by Mr Bush’s recent initiative to transform foods into fuel’ – an abuse of fertile land that Fidel has been condemning since 1985.

As we fumed companionably about this latest Bush aberration one of my friends remarked, ‘We surely have an ally in the State Department! Some guy who tells him what to say to bring dissidents back on side.’

We also fumed about Washington’s recent refusal to permit an MEP delegation to visit the Miami Five, a decision described by Willy Meyer MEP as ‘a violation of basic principles of justice’ and excused on the grounds that the Europeans did not know the Five before their
imprisonment
. These men’s ordeal had been often discussed during my Cuban journeys but I postponed outlining their case to this final chapter, hoping that by then they might have been released. Gerardo, Ramón, Antonio, Fernando, René – those names, accompanied by photographs large or small, are seen everywhere, from the foyers of luxury hotels to the gable ends of rural sheds, from garlanded wayside monuments to
barrio
façades and
tienda
check-out desks. Moreover, every Cuban seems familiar with the Five’s family backgrounds and in 2007 a best-selling book of their collected letters and poems was published in Havana.

Between 1990 and 2007 numerous US citizens funded and organised, from US territory, fifty-six major acts of violence against Cuba. These included shelling new tourist hotels from off-shore ‘fishing-boats’, planting a bomb in José Martí airport and attacking Viazul buses. When Cuban protests to the US and the UN were consistently ignored, Havana’s Ministry of the Interior deployed the Five to infiltrate the relevant gangs in Miami, as a safeguard against future attacks. Leonard Weinglass, the Five’s lead attorney, had repeatedly made clear that ‘By US law, no US citizen can take up arms against another country. And the classic definition of terrorism is: attacks directed against civilians to change policy’. Every country is entitled to use anti-terrorist agents to protect the homeland and the Five were breaking US federal laws only by failing to register as foreign agents (impractical, in the circumstances) and using false names – comparatively minor offences.

A MinInt statement explains:

Four days later the Five were accused of ‘conspiracy to commit espionage’. A second conspiracy charge involved only Gerardo, who had successfully infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue. Allegedly he had conspired with Cuban air force officers to shoot down two Cessna aircraft belonging to this group, killing four Cuban-Americans. Brothers to the Rescue had been founded in 1991 by José Basulto, a Bay of Pigs veteran, to help the minority of
balseros
(rafters) who capsised while illegally crossing the Florida Straits in defiance of the US Attorney-General’s instructions. These Cessnas often entered airspace to scatter seditious leaflets and in July 1995
Granma
published a warning:

Richard Gott records:

The Five’s case spawned many more violations of both US and
international
law. They did not resist arrest, were unarmed, had never been involved in damage to property or disturbances of any kind and were well regarded by their neighbours and workmates. Yet they were not allowed to apply for bail and spent seventeen months while awaiting trial in solitary confinement in cells reserved for ‘dangerous prisoners’ in maximum security jails hundreds of miles apart.

On the first day of their trial in a Miami court the Five readily identified themselves as agents of the Cuban state and Professor Lisandro Perez, Director of the Cuba Research Institute in the International University of Florida, observed, ‘The possibility of selecting twelve citizens from Miami Dade county that would be impartial in a case like this that includes
recognised
Cuban government agents is practically zero’. Illustrating this point, the then South Florida District Attorney, Guy Lewis, insisted in a
Miami Herald
article (18 August 2000) that the Five ‘had vowed to destroy the US’.

To prove the crime of espionage the law requires the acquisition of ‘national defence information’. As expert witness, the Five’s defence
presented
three high-ranking retired US officials, one of whom, Major-General Edward Atkinson, former Director of the CIA’s military intelligence, closely examined over twenty thousand pages of correspondence between the accused and MinInt. He found no instruction for the Five to seek classified information or take any action that would be harmful to the US.

Another witness for the defence, Debbie McMullen, investigator in the Office of the Public Defender, testified to ‘finding boats in the Miami River being prepared to take explosives to Cuba and the proposal of the accused Gerardo Hernández to pass on that information to the FBI via an anonymous telephone call’.

At the end of an almost seven-month trial, during which the jury heard seventy-four witnesses, they deliberated only briefly and submitted not one query before unanimously finding the Five guilty on all counts. This included finding Gerardo guilty of first-degree murder which intensified the procedure’s aura of unreality; the prosecution, reckoning that that case ‘presents an insurmountable hurdle for the US’, had long since applied to
withdraw the infamous Charge Three. Six months later (why so long?) Judge Joan A. Leonard imposed three life sentences – which in the US means
life
– and gave the others nineteen and fifteen years.

Five years later (long years, for the Five in their maximum security jails) the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta at last handed down its verdict – a ninety-three-page document. That panel of three judges reversed the Miami courts’ convictions, already declared illegal by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the Human Rights Commission of the UN. Speaking for the Cuban government, Ricardo Alarcon said, ‘While what took place in Miami was a charade that shames the American legal system Atlanta produced an example of professional ethics and rigour that goes beyond the bounds of the normal appeals process, to demonstrate the innocence of the five accused and expose the colossal injustice to which they fell victim.’